HEALTH ‘I had the siz pineap my do said it consti
A third of women wait more than three months for a correct diagnosis after going to their doctor with ovarian cancer symptoms, reports
Dot Bailey was in such agony she could barely walk into her local surgery. It was July 2021, and Dot, then 62, had made countless visits in the previous two years and was sure her GP would take her seriously this time. After all, her stomach was so swollen she looked eight months pregnant. Yet the doctor brushed her concerns aside once more.
“She told me I was constipated,” Dot recalls. “I knew that wasn’t it. I said, ‘Have you seen my tummy?’ but she paid no attention and prescribed me with a laxative.
“When I got home I was in such pain we phoned 111 and I was told to go to A&E where a doctor said the swelling should have been enough to alert my GP to refer me for further tests.
“I was admitted and scanned. They found a lump the size of a pineapple.”
Dot, a retired civil servant from Stoke, always felt she was aware of her body.
But because she had undergone a hysterectomy and the removal of her ovaries in her 30s, ovarian cancer didn’t cross her mind when she started getting worrying symptoms in 2019.
“I’d had my daughter Lucy when I was 18, and then a miscarriage when trying to conceive again,” she explains.
“Fertility problems resulted in various operations to alleviate my symptoms, but at 26 I was told I’d never conceive naturally again.
“My doctors tried to save one ovary but were unsuccessful so both were removed along with my uterus – and I was plunged straight into early menopause, taking HRT for five years.”
From then on, Dot had no major health worries.
“On my 60th birthday in 2019 my husband Paul and I walked up Snowdon with a bottle of Prosecco,” she says. “Life was good. But soon after that I started developing very uncomfortable symptoms. Bloating so bad you could actually see it.
“My clothes fitted me one week and not the next. I needed to wee more, had abdominal pain and changes in my bowel habits. I was back and forward to my doctor, but ovarian cancer never crossed my mind. I didn’t know you could still get it even after your ovaries are removed, but it seems some ovarian cells can be left behind and turn cancerous.” Ovarian cancer is often described as a silent killer, but it is lack of awareness rather than lack of symptoms that prevents early diagnosis. Key symptoms which occur frequently from the offset are bloating, abdominal pain, needing to wee more often and feeling full quickly.
Ovarian cancer moves fast, but many women ignore vague tummy troubles and indigestion for months. Your supermarket shop could provide the tell-tale sign you have a problem – if you
My doctor should have known. Don’t accept being brushed off. Be a nuisanc